Manistee Paddlesport Adventures

Excellent experience. Beautiful river. Nice friendly staff. Reasonable rates. Great location especially if you stay at the instalaunch campground. We just ended right there no spotting vehicles.

Did a 3 day trip down the Little Manistee River. Staff was friendly and knowledgeable. Would recommend this place to anyone.

DONT WASTE YOUR MONEY! They hold your credit card and then give you the wrong directions so when you get lost and show up late, you still pay and don’t get to go on the trip! Horrible customer service, incompetent staff and a great way to ruin your entire vacation! They lie and tell you there are no other trips and then give your PAID rentals to someone else and make twice the money. Go with another company!!!

Plain and simple this company is made up of thieves and cheats. They will charge you for (booked) unused tubes that they’ve re-​rented out to other people. They have an extra charge for everything. DO NOT GIVE THEM YOUR CREDIT CARD! Do business with whoever you like but you’ve been warned.

I was hoping for a great trip b/​c it was the first time my kids had ever been tubing. We opted for the 4.5 hour trip thinking it would be a nice way to spend the day. The trip actually took us 6 hours, no breaks and we were paddling with our hands and shoes more than half the trip!
When you first get into the river you have to fight the current to get down to where the water starts to flow in the direction you are supposed to head. With a 5 and 7 year old this took us a good 20 minutes.
At one point in the river, just after the first bluff you pass there is a large downed tree that will suck you in if you are close to it and not making a conscious effort to avoid it… dangerous! There are several additional spots along the river where downed trees, logs, etc. provide obstacles that hung us up.
Finally (6 hours into the trip) we see the bridge where you are supposed to turn and head down the canal to the exit point in the campground. There is absolutely no water movement here… I would guess, had we paddled ourselves down the canal to the instructed pull out spot it would have taken us an additional half an hour or more. Instead we climbed out at a dock and started walking back. Lucky for us a woman from the campground saw us and drove the tubes back in a golf cart.
I would imagine that after a few years in business the company has a feel for how long the trips take given river conditions, weather, etc. I wish they would have given us an accurate estimate for the time the trip would take. A leisurely 4 and a half hour trip would have been great. However, if we hadn’t been paddling I can’t imagine how much longer the trip could have been! I would never attempt to tube here again, but this would have been a nice trip on a canoe or kayak, which they do rent.